Finding God in Nature

Roger Pomainville celebrates the impact of a Regis education with ongoing generosity

By Laura Bond

When Roger Pomainville was eight years old, he had an experience that would lay a foundation for a spiritual way of looking at the world. While attending Camp St. Malo, a summer program for youth at the base of Mount Meeker, he fell in love with nature. Specifically, with mountains.

“I didn’t realize it for several years, that what was happening to me was a spiritual experience,” he said. “I would just look at a tree and see God. To climb a mountain – that’s a way of being with God.”

Pomainville climbed Chiefs Head Peak at age 12, served as hiking leader at Camp Malo by 15 and, by 17, had climbed half the peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park. Now, at 80, Pomainville has climbed more than 340 mountains, including 23 of Colorado’s iconic 14ers, as well some of the most majestic peaks in the world, including Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania; Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Russia and Europe; and Mount Lobuche, a peak near the Everest base camp in Nepal, which he attempted as part of an international climbing expedition when he was 71.

"When you get high up on a mountain and look around, you see the beauty of nature and know you’re in the presence of God. And you know that you are there only because of His will.”

“I’ve asked myself: ‘How many people in this world have ever been able to see and do this?’ I have been very fortunate and very blessed.”

What began as a seed of inspiration when Pomainville was a boy sprouted into a worldview during the four years he spent as an undergraduate at Regis College. He graduated in 1965 with an accounting degree followed by a JD and LLM in Taxation. Nearly 60 years later, he says Regis was formative to his success in business and life. The accounting skills he gained as an undergraduate provided a jumping-off point for a long and successful career in tax law and real estate and property development. The spiritual education was foundational in other, more surprising, and important ways.

Group of people walk on a windy trail up a mountain

“I went to Regis because I really wanted to pick up a profession or something that I could use in the future and beyond,” he says. “But when I got there, it was kind of a shock when they told me I’m going to take 12 hours of philosophy, 12 hours of theology. And I thought, why did I end up here? What is this? What I didn’t realize at the time is that Regis taught me how to live the other 12 hours of the day,” he said. “They made me a more complete and more caring person, and they gave me direction to embrace and share all that life has to offer.”

Pomainville says the Regis experience was deepened by the mentorship he received from a professor in the program, Robert Lacey, who encouraged his entrepreneurial leanings, including the small tax-services enterprise Pomainville launched as an undergraduate. He and a group of fellow accounting students prepared tax returns for farmers and small businesses in rural areas north of Denver. “We’d have classes in the morning, eat lunch, then get in my car and drive north to do tax returns,” he recalled. “I had to get everyone back to Regis before six so we could have dinner.”

For the past 25 years, Pomainville’s gratitude for that mentorship has manifested in annual gifts to the Robert Lacey Accounting Scholar Endowment, which today provides a Regis education to aspiring finance professionals through the Anderson College of Business and Computing. Pomainville and his family recently deepened their investment in Regis by establishing the Pomainville Family Endowment, which will provide need-based scholarship support for future accounting students. The endowment was launched with a $50,000 gift earlier this year. Pomainville also named the scholarship as the beneficiary of a $300,000 gift in his will that will ensure its long-term sustainability.

“God has blessed me and my family beyond my wildest dreams,” Pomainville said. “By going forward with this endowment, we want to provide tuition for someone that needs it, to give them the opportunity and the many, many things in life that have been given to us. The idea that you can start something that will keep going, for someone who may be the first in their family to graduate, that’s really neat. You kind of open it up for the whole family.”

Pomainville says he hopes his family’s decision to include Regis in its estate plan will inspire others to do the same. As he has told his children and grandchildren throughout their lives, “This just didn’t happen, God has given us a lot and you must share these blessing with others.” It’s always worthwhile to give and do things for others. “That’s the way I’ve always tried to look at it: You never know where life will take you, but it will be a fabulous journey if you share your blessings and try to make it better” he said. “There’s always something positive in that, and it does come back to you in spades.”